The Creative Process in the Individual

What if the power that first called the worlds into being has not withdrawn from its work, but is repeating it now, in miniature, within the mind that reads these words? This is the threshold at which Troward places his reader. He asks that we trace creation back past every chain of cause and effect to a single origin: Spirit contemplating itself. In that act of self-contemplation lies the seed of all form, cosmic and personal alike. The individual, Troward shows, is not a by-product of this process but a subordinate center through which it continues. Universal law is fixed, yet it waits to be specialized through human initiative and selection. This is what he calls the Personal Factor.

From this ground the book opens into wide country. Polarity appears as the engine of secondary causation and of evolution, the play of forces that builds the ascending kingdoms of nature, yet Troward is careful never to mistake it for the origin of creation. The ascent he describes leads beyond intellectual man, the Fourth Kingdom, toward a Fifth Kingdom of conscious individuality. At this point past experience loses its authority to set limits, for principle is not bound by precedent. Matter is a real projection of Spirit, so that Spirit stands as Alpha and solid form as Omega of a single Creative Series. Out of this follow some of the most searching pages Troward ever wrote, on subjective and objective mind, on the state after death, on the Resurrection of the Body, and on physical regeneration as the logical end of evolution rather than a fable.

Such power calls for a safeguard, and Troward names it plainly: a Divine Standard of Personality. Without it, creative force turns against itself. He traces evil, sickness, and limitation to inverted thought, to Fear, and to what he calls the Affirmation of Negation. Beside the impersonal Soul of Nature, the Anima Mundi, he places its complement, the Personality of God, the Animus Dei, and he presents Christ as the specialization of the universal Principle of Humanity. In the Divine Offering the reader finds a ground of certainty from which fear can no longer draw its strength.

The book closes on practice rather than theory. Its distinction between inherited race-thought and the true New Thought of one who measures himself by a higher standard comes to rest in worship within the Temple of the Innermost, where time and space fall away. The closing chapters, added for the 1915 edition, were among the last teachings Troward set down. They are best read slowly, as a map of ground the reader is meant, in time, to walk.